Eleven

The Floor

The nurse in the pharmacy: in the city where you were born, in the city where I gave birth to you; she draws fluid, cold like the moon, and loads it into a syringe, a shoe.
She pumps B12 into you.
Into the white loaf under your shirt.
You murmur something and go.
What do you feel? Is it safe to say so?
People are hungry for lunch.
Just hungry for something new.
You drift between the shelves.
It's a hot summer's day.
You feel a burning.
Hot or cold, you cannot say.
In your brain and in your feet.
You stand in your cold square keep.
You feel your nose and cheeks drip with ice.
Your legs slowly give way
like trees that have been chopped all day.
You close your eyes and try to squeeze life back.
You concentrate on your heart, you suck in a breath
But a cold snail coils itself on your tongue
Like a liquorice and poison snack
You try not to swallow
But you begin, slowly, to see the floor reaching up to you.
The floor pulls at your shoulders and your chin.
It's all going yellow
And before you even hit the ground,
the floor
and everything around you has disappeared.

Now you lie on the floor, like a corpse.
Now do you see how it is?
Now do you see?
There is no sizzling of insects in summer's frying pan.
There is not a single bird that looks down on you.
There is not even a breeze to touch your toe.
High in the heavens your Earthly thoughts create a stir.
High in the sky your electric sparks begin to spin.
Higher and higher you turn spiraling linen thread.
Not a single sound.
Not a single leaf or frog or flute.
Not even the touch of a human hand or puppy's tongue or tail, to stroke your hand or touch your ear.

There is just the powerful poetry of the universe. There is the emptiness. A vast space of cold and black.

But now you know, my son, that there is more, much more, than that.

Energy is tied in the fission fields of stone, or a ball, or a shoe. Huge blossoming arrays of frozen energy sleep in matrices of locked in life.
Your finger, this paper, is full of storms.
And here you lie, my boy, become this man, with this gentle forehead and its paths worn away by worries and doubts, by brooding and suspicions.
And yet there is still youth and joy and strength in the shining brow.
Because beside these paths I see the forests they have cut down. The lush and gentle power that whispers and sleeps beside the busy dirt tracks of your yellow and green and blue traffic. Your thoughts shuffle by, sometimes stuck, like traffic jammed, sometimes flowing as traffic jams do.
I wonder when these paths will fill with the vivid energy of parrots, the fallen goodness of fruit, or shimmer with the treasure of a new season's silver morning, or the flames of an autumn fire.

Life is like walking on a path through a forest.
You have a glimpse now, of what it is like to be in the forest. Yes, to be the forest. It is so much more than just the path through it. It is all the roots and all the leaves, all the stems and all the fruits, filling up with the sun, sucking up the sugars and salts of the Earth, breathing it all in and all the million surfaces, letting all out.

Now you return to the path, and breath begins to fill your emptiness.

I see you here, lying on the floor, and behind your dead eyes I feel the universe fill with your spirit.
It swells, the way water in a bath inches higher when a bar of soap slips into it. It swells its tiny swelling, when another drop of water joins the soapy water.
It swells, almost imperceptible to he or she, when the smallest ant ice-skates off the ceramic edge.
And yet across the gulf of space, I can be right here with you, holding your silver fingers in my own, in this one instant that they tremor between a single moment of your life, and the next.

You yield enormous energy. You are frozen to your flesh, like a tree imbedded in an acorn.

Before you yield to the life in you, this living tissue, the luminous splendor engulfs you for one more singular moment. It happens so quickly that you probably do not notice it. You have, after all, skipped from one moment of life to the next. But beneath you an abyss falls and fills with colorless light and emptiness. You will know, as I know now, that emptiness cannot exist without it being filled, with stars, with swirling masses of stars sweeping in a dance. You fill with your imagination, and your shining arms shower sparks and vigorous eruptions of energy into the universe like spring flowers filling fields. You fill emptiness around you with plasma and power.

Imagine a glass of water on the edge of a long long jetty, jutting far into a blue blue sea. A powerful wave reaches up, thuds hard into the pillars that hold it up out of the water. The glass begins to bicycle in a small circle, and then topples off the edge. As it falls, the living water spills out of it, and into the sea, and moments later, the glass is filled up with the soup and its lovely light. It's a soup filled with electrical salts and gulping jellyfish. The great tides may pull and push this glass through all the waves, until its glassy shield decides to dissolve into the living cocoon that connects into the ocean's drenched fabric.
You lie here like a glass, with your energy, for just a moment, somersaulting up, as though a table under you has been kicked.
Your table has been kicked by the sudden infusion of highly concentrated Vitamin B12. Your brain, in an effort to contain this imbalance, has shutdown.
Give it a moment my boy.

And now, the salts in your brain settle like crystals on popcorn.
The traffic begins to flow.
Your brain fills again with fresh blood.
Your eyes flicker open and your silver hands fill with red ribbons and wet flesh and bursts the silver balloon of my ghostly grip.
Above you a heavenly ceiling, and twelve apostles reverts to a ceiling, and some people standing over this young man, who fainted in a pharmacy.